


The Siren

by Asreoniplier (AsreonInfusion)



Series: The Siren [1]
Category: Video Blogging RPF, Who Killed Markiplier? (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gender-neutral Reader, M/M, Manipulation, Mer AU, Mild Smut, Other, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-19 18:39:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19138432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsreonInfusion/pseuds/Asreoniplier
Summary: It starts with a shipwreck, and an island, and the grey-skinned merman with sharp teeth and tentacles and eyes as black as the ocean at night.





	The Siren

**Author's Note:**

> A random mer AU that spawned from a long and convoluted train of thoughts, and taking some metaphors a little too literally. I was only meant to be writing an outline for it, but somehow it became it's own small fic in and of itself. Sometimes these things just happen, whoops.

It starts with a shipwreck, and an island.

After the storm, you wash up there. It’s an old volcanic island, crescent-shaped with a massive ocean crater in the middle, forming a bay. There’s not a huge amount of land. It’s mostly black volcanic rock, with some sand worn away at the shore, and plantlife struggling to grow in the meagre offerings of the ground.

Just about enough to offer shelter, and a little firewood for perhaps a week or two. Not enough to survive on. Not enough to provide sufficient food.

The first night alone, you make a small fire and wrap your arms around your knees, singing to the still night air to keep yourself company.

In the morning, there are fresh fish left by the shoreline, and strange markings in the sand.

The second night you try to keep watch, but the night is cold and clear and utterly unnerving in its silence. You sing to yourself again--at least until you see something out in the middle of the crater. A shape, too dark to see, but the reflection of the silver moonlight shines against it like a pair of eyes watching you. 

The third night you meet him. He looks human at first, the man – creature – who raises himself halfway out of the water with more food to give you. Black hair that falls across his face, sharp teeth, eyes like the void. He has two sets of eyelids - the second set is clear, sliding sideways across his eyes as he slowly blinks at you. Cold. Calculating. Like a predator, like he’s evaluating if he can devour you.

But he only hands you the fish he’s caught - he has clawed, webbed fingers, and his hands are grey and clammy - and when he turns and dives back into the water you see a mass of inky tentacles where his lower body should be.

The fourth night he speaks. His voice sounds rasping and strained - it’s difficult for him to speak out of the water. But he introduces himself as Dark, and you introduce yourself in turn. He doesn’t stay long, and when he’s gone, you return you your fire and sing to yourself again to soothe your unsettled nerves.

He _is_... unsettling. Not because of how he looks, but something about the way he speaks. The way he looks at you. 

Still. You don’t have anyone else, and if it weren’t for the fish he brings each night, you wouldn’t be able to survive. You talk to him. He lingers in the shallows, watching you. Maybe listening, you can’t quite tell since he never really seems to react, but you tell him all the stories you can remember from your past life. You ask him about his life, why he stays here.

There’s a thick metal collar around his throat, locked shut with an unusual rusted red pendant. Mentioning it makes him snarl and dive back into the black depths of his ocean crater.

It’s only after you mention the shipwreck he starts talking. You don’t remember much about it. There was another ship you saw, an exquisite thing. Large and royally decorated. It had pulled alongside you, and their crew asked for-- it was an odd request. For an offering. And there was a man, smirking and arrogant. His face won’t come to your recollection - no, stranger than that, it feels like he had many faces - but you know he had felt... wrong.

There had been nothing on your ship to give, and he had spat a curse at you before departing. After that, the storm had descended.

“Who was he?” you ask. Dark’s tentacles writhe behind him, stirring up the inky water.

“Trickster. Despicable creature,” Dark says coldly, in that rasping hiss his voice always makes above water. There are gills on the sides of his throat, and they pulse erratically in the air.

“Do you want revenge?” Dark asks the next night.

“What?”

“Bastard. Petty being. Demanding to be worshipped and adored, when he is only a self-absorbed narcissist.”

“The man on the ship?”

“Hardly a man. A monster. He sank your ship for the most minor of infractions. Kills carelessly. Seeks nothing but his own amusement and revelry.” Dark pauses, blinking slowly again. Watching you, evaluating every reaction. “Trapped me here like this.” He bares his teeth and cracks his neck, and then he’s gone.

Nothing more is mentioned of revenge, or entrapment, after that. Slowly, you move away from your fire and closer to the water each night. Then you start wading in to join him.

Dark is... fascinating. He rarely speaks - and you understand why - but when he does there’s something controlled and clipped about his tone, even with the strain of being out of the water, and something about him that screams power. His back is inky black as well, the same rubbery skin as his tentacles reaching up his spine and across his ribs. His stomach and arms are grey-skinned, human and leanly muscled. A swimmer’s physique. Of course.

His eyes are--like the depths of the night sky, or the deepest recesses of the ocean. You could drown in them. Dark hums, and there’s a quiet clicking noise in the back of his throat, and you find yourself lost in his hypnotic gaze.

You’re not sure at what point you let him start touching you. You thought it was only curiosity at first. But, no. Whatever Dark is, he is familiar with humans.

You’re not sure at what point he first kissed you, or how many more nights it is before he lays you down in the shallows and those tentacles of his slide up your thighs and rock into you and make you feel like heaven.

“Free me,” he commands you, even as you’re still shaking with bliss.

The binding spell is tricky. Mark-- that’s what Dark calls him, and when you comment how much of an ordinary name it is for a trickster god, Dark only snorts and says that he was nothing but a man once, before ego and corrupt dealings with powers beyond human comprehension turned him into the thing he is now. Dark refuses to address him as any kind of god.

The binding Mark placed to trap Dark here requires a blood sacrifice to break.

“Just a little,” Dark purrs, eyes so cold and black. “Just a little is all it will take.”

You don’t quite remember going to find the shard of rock, a sharp sliver of obsidian. You must have clambered over to the other side of the island during the day to find it. 

Why can’t you remember?

“Just a little,” Dark encourages with poison sweetness.

You slice your palm with the crude obsidian blade, then place your bleeding hand over the pendant locked around Dark’s neck. And you scream.

You can’t pull away, fingers tightening around the pendant like in rigor mortis. Eyes wide and horrified, you can only watch as the collar containing Dark crumbles. His power flares in an instant, red and blue auras writhing around him, his form growing dark and monstrous and that  _smile_. He smiles at you as the pendant drains you more and more and more, and he strengthens as the binding unravels.

The weight of his presence feels like it could crush your chest, something eldritch and horrifying, an ancient malice.

Maybe he was sealed away for a reason.

Dark drags you down into the water with him, blood billowing from your hand as the pendant shatters. Deep, deeper, into the blackest depths. Bubbles burst from your lips until you have no air left to give, and only then does Dark kiss you again. Drowning, but your lungs take in him instead of the ocean water.

He smiles, sharp teeth like the jagged rocks that send ships to their doom.

* * *

“You don’t sing for me anymore, love,” Dark murmurs. One of his tentacles wraps around your waist, the tendrils of his auras, his power, brushing against your skin.

You glance away. “I sing enough during the day.”

His hands run claws through your hair and down your sides, where your flesh is marred by countless inky sigils, so many they blur together and make your legs and arms look almost entirely black. Symbols of power, of change, of binding. Of what he did to you to turn you into this.

You can breathe underwater. On land too, still, though it’s more difficult now.

You should have died, he tells you. The power it took to undo the binding should have cost you your life.

“Then why the hell did you let me do it?!” you’d screamed at him.

Calmly, coldly, with that same slow blink of his nictitating eyelids, he had replied, “because my power is greater.”

He’d saved you, or so he maintains, but at what cost? Saved you, claimed you as his own. Decided to keep you, instead of destroying you as he would any other human, as if that were the  _honour_  you were granted for helping him. And so he’d made you this... thing.

A siren. That’s what you are now.

He sends you to the surface, to the strait where the ships pass through, and has you sing for them. Lure them away, lure them to the rocks, and as they sink Dark sifts through the debris and devours the humans he finds.

Yet it’s never enough.

He kisses your hair and curls his hands over yours. You close your eyes and sigh. You hate him. You hate how he uses you. His little murderer. He doesn’t see it that way, far too beyond humanity for that, but it makes whatever is left of your soul ache.

It’s easier to forget. To let him tilt your head back and capture you in his eyes, let the mindless roar of the ocean fill your head like static. Let his voice override your senses - you can hear how he really sounds at last, down here so deep beneath the waves, and it’s low and sensual and reverberates with the weight of unfathomable centuries.

You hate him, but you love him.

His praises you, tells you how he adores the sound of your voice. He can still act oh so charming and seductive when he wants to. His tentacles bind you and hold you in place as he toys with your body with hands and lips. He bites sometimes, if you’ve been disobedient, and the wounds are like the marks a shark would leave.

But when you’ve been good for him, he lets those tentacles sink into you and curl inside you until you’re trembling from the pleasure, screaming your devotion to him.

You’re his siren, his lure, the bait.

Waiting for the day Mark’s ship returns, when together you will drag him down and _tear him apart_.


End file.
